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I wouldn’t be sur­prised to find out that many of us here today like to see our work as a con­tin­u­a­tion of say the Tech Model Railroad Club or the Homebrew Computer Club, and cer­tain­ly the ter­mi­nol­o­gy and the val­ues of this con­fer­ence, like open source for exam­ple, have their roots in that era. As a con­se­quence it’s easy to inter­pret any crit­i­cism of the hack­er ethic—which is what I’m about to do—as a kind of assault.

We have to know what we want. We have to imag­ine how it looks. We have to under­stand how it feels, how it smells, how it func­tions, before we can design it. Before we can code it. Before we can imple­ment it, and before we can sell it.